The contemplative element of nature and its coalescence with art and memory, once again, find their enduring qualities in Elaine Roberto-Navas’ paintings. From traces of photographs to their manifestations on canvas, each image becomes a paean of philosophical musing that reveals the interconnectedness of things. The astute and intuitive transfer—of a symbolic reference and memorial such as a fleeting snapshot and into a mixture of colors and textures in Roberto-Navas’ corporeal paintings—embodies the old wisdom found in careful observations made by the ancients against things that were merely there: a brook, an assembly of leaves and twigs, and the sky’s reflection. These are the elements that correspond to the everything.

Roberto-Navas’ latest solo exhibition in MO_Space takes us back to the old nature philosophies, where the concept of becoming lies at the heart of its inquiry: “nothing changes, yet everything does,” and so goes the torment in discovering the substance of nature, as expressed by the Greeks’ burgeoning rationalists, from Anaxagoras to Democritus. “Everything flows,” says Heraclitus. Nothing is abiding. The saying, “one cannot step twice into the same river,” becomes man’s prevailing remark to confirm that the world is in constant flux.

Made up of five sets of diptychs, the show is a continuation of a series of paintings based on images from a single source (the contemplative photographs of Mawen Ong). Here, art becomes an allegory for nature’s passage. One whose essence is universal and transferrable. The conversion into painting is a conversion of energy and a reincarnation of substance, forged neither by wind nor fire but by color, paint, and their composition. From one’s memory to another’s vision—photograph to painting here becomes the ‘flow of energy,’ catalyzed not just by atomic particles but by developed ties, like kinship and friendship, and all things personal.  

There is indeed something that emanates from the works of Elaine Roberto-Navas. Something that is abiding, that holds fast, and flows. Different each moment, yet at the same time constant—a devotion. One that can be traced through memory and through the act of commencing faith: of painting someone else’s pictures with one’s own vision, like these photographs taken by a dear friend, who in turn has also reciprocated faith by relinquishing her pictures to the artist.

The Everything is astounding when seen through its parts. And once again, Elaine Roberto-Navas has proven to be a maven for gathering its fragments—these partial scenes, these thickets, these microcosms of nature’s systems, and turn them into dutiful meditations so that we, in turn, may re-discover the whole.